Internet Memories

[Brodie]

I can remember when I was in school in the late 80s I bought a computer to do papers...etc. I can remember my father asking me why I was spending all my money on a computer when a word processor could do what I needed for half the price... Unfortunately Dad didn't live long enough to see the computer revolution fully take hold...

I was a charter member of "Prodigy" The old, old DOS based version... That's where I got my first exposure to Bulletin Boards! I remember when they had upgraded to a windows based program and they had a web browser (their own) that sucked! They eventually shut down because they were losing money and they weren't y2k compatible... Those were the days... Any other "Prodigy Classic" people here??

[mrdobolina]

Nice thead, SG. I am always amazed that a mere 10 years ago, the internet was only in its infancy....as far as mass appeal goes.

Brusch...you went to Uof Illinois too, right? My alma mater, Uof Illinois was huge into computers and the internet. So every student had an email account and could log onto the internet from their dorm/apt via phone lines. We used Pine, and Eudora, and all of those first email programs. I remember using IRC chat and talking with people in Austrailia all the time.

And then one day, probably in '93, my older brother calls me and says "have you checked out the world wide web at all??", and I said, you mean the internet, right? and he replied that www was an interface that would change the world, delivering pics, video, commercial internet sites, etc. I realized then what we had and that the future was going to bring crazy advances in information, technology, and commerce.

I truly feel that I was on the leading edge of that. I started working for, and developing an e-commerce company in 1994. We started an online grocery delivery company. First it was bulletin boards and phone and fax that customers could use to place their orders, because hardly anyone had internet connectivity at home. After only 3 years, we had developed a website, and software that you could use to order groceries online and have them delivered the next day. Unfortunately, Webvan came along, went under, and basically killed peoples desire for grocery delivery--that and the bubble bursting on all the dotcom stocks!

[Maveno]

DOS, Lotus 1,2,3... spreadsheets. Ahhhh the early memories!!!

Game playing, "Wolfenstein"... use the numbers and/or letters to navigate around the DOS game. Hours and hours...... I honestly still miss that game. Anyone ever play it? It's an oldtimer game.

AOL...hell yeah I'll subscribe and go to these "chat rooms" to see what the fuss is all about. Honest to God, I think there were about 5 rooms to talk in!! Compared to today, the chatrooms back then were ghost towns....except for the hardcore chatters who kept it alive and kicking (raising hand). I thought..oh, how neat that I can view porn stuff at home with NOBODY knowing!! LOL What a puppy....I'd like to think I am a bit more savvy today, knowing that Big Brother (the real BB, not the reality show--lol) knows where you go.

What did I do before the internet!?!?!!?!

ETA: A HUGE pet peeve of mine is when people/radio ads/tv ads/etc say "WWW dot abc company dot com"... WHO really needs to know that it's "www" before the site name?! Just announce it as "abc dot com".. we ALL know it's the WORLD WIDE WEB we're going to go to.

[hepcat]

Wow, MrDob. I have to believe that idea will come back someday. Webvan just spread itself too thin what with stadium endorsements and too many vans, but people loved having their groceries delivered.

I used BBS's as far back as 1989 or so, but it was so unwieldy - you had to go to the computer lab, you used pine and vi...it was more like a geeky hobby than anthing else. That's about when I would get into fights with people about Star Trek versus Star Wars - we were all geeks out there.

But in graduate school things were changing. My boyfriend (then, now hubby) was always talking about the amazing World Wide Web (sound familiar? ) but I didn't really get into it, just used the internet for email with a dial-up modem. Then about 1994 or so my boyfriend became his department's computer lab manager and the combination of expensive machines and all nighters in the lab with hubby won me over to the possibilities of the Web.

Back then he had a book called something like "Complete Guide to the Internet" and it was about 250 pages. Does anyone else remember that?

Brusch, I Commodore64 games! I think we may have talked about this in the 80's thread. They need to come out with a good C64 emulator so we can play those games again.

ETA: Maveno, I loved Castle Wolfenstein!!

[glennajo]

I invented the internet.

I've only had a computer since 2001, and the only reason I bought it was to make on-line orders for my business. It took me months to figure anything out, and I was constantly on the phone with a friend asking inane questions about the things I didn't understand. I've got it all figured out now though. Well, I know how to use email and post at the FoRT, and that's good enough for me!

One thing I remember about first having email was that I forwarded everything I received. If it said send to 10 friends now or you'll have bad luck for the rest of your life, or you'll get a $20 gift certificate to Old Navy, or Microsoft will send you $4 for every person you email....etc, I was sending those babies out! Looking back, I'm pretty sure all my friends hated me for that. Now I send nothing out except personal notes or the occasional joke or picture that makes me actually laugh out loud.

Ahh, the good old days.

[mrdobolina]

I can barely remember what life was like without the internet....even though I lived without it for the first 2/3's of my life. Is that weird?? Its the same with cable/satellite tv. I know I used to get by with 4-5 channels, but I can't really remember what that was like. Its all changed so drastically in 10-15 years! It really blows my mind sometime.

Along the lines of this thread, there is a Simpsons episode where Homer flashes back to his youth to deal with a memory that is currently haunting him. So he's a teenager, hanging out with Lenny, Karl, and Moe, and they start talking about the future. Lenny says "Has anyone heard of this 'Internet'?? Everyone shakes their head..."Its this netted lining they are putting in swimsuits now so they fit better".

I always get a laugh out of that.

[Maveno]

Thats funny!!!

[totoro]

Great topic gazer!

Wow... I haven't thought about it for years, but I met the internet shortly before the "world wide web" hit the mainstream. Using my Macintosh SE, I "logged on" using my 4800 baud (or maybe it was 24K?) to Prodigy, where my screen name was something like 6791jf0suytrgKS. I hated that program, but soon discovered eWorld... anyone remember that??? I think it was a mac-only thing, but very cute and easy to use. Whe AOL 1.0 came around, you had to shell out a few bucks to get one of those infernal floppies...now they just mail them out by the gazillions for FREE! Lucky us.

I saw my first porn pic from "America On Line", and it took approximately 18 minutes to download, and filled up my 2MB hard drive immediately. 2MB, can you dig it?

There was something back then called gopher and was it Archie? or Veronica?that allowed for file transfers. It was so different. Somewhere around AOL 4.0 a www browser became part of the package, but the access was still pretty limited. So I joined Earthlink (with my spankin-new several-hundred dollar 14.4 modem), and it took me awhile to figure what the heck to look at because there was NO GOOGLE! I'm now a google-aholic, so I don't know how I made through those dark dark years.


Ah....memory lane.

[haejin]

Uh, my earliest memories of the internet was when I was about 5 or 6. I could tell all sorts of AOL horror stories, but I won't. I never really used it until I was in 4th grade, but then I became obsessed. I still am.

[libra1022]

My first experiences on computers were back in roughly 1985 and all I can remember doing on them was creating banners and word processing.

When computers starting becoming more common in the workplace we had them at the Taco Bell's and I learned to use those...but they were only programmed for company functions like scheduling and processing inventories and invoices, this was around 1992.

My first home computer was actually a WebTV...my friend had one and brought it to my house and I just thought it was the best thing in the world. I went out almost immediately and got one for myself, ummm when did they come out?? 1998 or so? The first thing I ever remember doing online was searching for body modification and tattoo sites. When I went on vacation in 2000 I went to visit one of my friends that I'd met thru a game chat using WebTV and she had recently upgraded to a "real" computer and was doing all sorts of stuff that I was jealous of....simple things like playing spades and canasta instead of just the stuff in Talk City (that was about all you could do on WebTV). I immediately came home and started saving my pennies and got a "real" computer and internet connection later that year.